Blog News: A new look, a new partnership, and a homework assignment

Hey, how do I look? And by “I,” I mean the BLOG with its fancy new makeover!

I really liked the old look, so I’ve kept the basic color scheme, but I was ready for a change and wanted something a bit easier on the eyes – a wider text block and more flexibility with headers and colors so I can continue to play around. I was going to do this change later, but I’ve got some blog news and thought it would be perfect to launch things with a new look. So…

Announcing: I’m pleased to announce a new partnership with Talking Writing magazine. The How to Become a Writer Series here at PhD in Creative Writing will now include interviews with Talking Writing’s featured writers. These interviews will be co-published by Talking Writing.

The first author I’ll be interviewing is Mark Brazaitis. In preparation for the interview, here is your homework:

Read Mark Brazaitis’s awesome story, “Cancer Is a Killer, and So Am I” at Talking Writing. When you are finished, meditate on its humor and profundity, fantasize about doing away with your nemesis, ponder your own humanity and mortality, and wait patiently for his interview, which will appear in this Sunday’s installment of the How To Become a Writer series.

Here’s how it begins:

I am dying. I am not dying courageously. Or gracefully. Or with good humor. My dying will not be emulated by other dying people or become the subject of a best-selling book. My dying will not move millions.

I am dying pathetically, painfully, bitterly.

I am dying in my daughter’s basement in her house in Sherman, Ohio, in a single bed against the west window, through which I can see the sun set behind a loose line of red maple trees. Behind the maple trees is the house of a man I have despised most of my life. It is the ultimate insult to see him working in his yard: mowing grass, pruning bushes, chopping wood. Sometimes he works with his shirt off, his torso bronzed. He is my age. He will probably outlive me by twenty-five years.

[Read the rest at Talking Writing.]